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[violettesiren]

Again the summer fires swallow forests of the homes I've forged, from California

to Provence—another year and still your silence lingers sly and discarnate as smoke.

I can no longer picture you as more than a held space, an inexorable lack. In this way,

you resemble the dead: ever -present and beyond my grasp.

If I could touch again your body I would not believe it,

could only wait for you to vanish like dream's vapor once I approached.

The summer we exiled each other, I drove through miles of smoke, yet never witnessed

its source. My longing like that: haze devoid of its origin.

Do I need you at all, or does my desire flourish untended, a blaze burning long past

first spark? There are fires so intractable they become

a fact of their landscape—fires like seasons by which we keep time.

Again the Summer Fires by Leila Chatti

[violettesiren]

We don’t call for them. We don’t call this ache, this falling feeling, this watching of leaves as they fall redly mid-summer. The them up there is the leaves, but who is the we that refuses to call and ache and call it so? Call it a lie, or call it hope. I would be the sharpest flint among those sober stones. No one could ever mistake me. I have the eyes of someone who grieves like it’s the last thing she’ll do: gray and grim as the summer sky. See how I said she. I am making me as wide and shadowful as possible. I am clouds in the shape of leaves, of honeybees, of echoes, ohs.

Wide and Shadowful by Claire Wahmanholm

[violettesiren]

Stay in this world with me.

There go the ships. The little buses. The sanctity, the subway. But let us stay.

Every world has pain, I knew it when I brought you

to this one. It’s true— the rain is never stopped by the children’s parade. Still

I tell you, it weakens you after a while into love.

The plastic cow, the plastic barn, The fat yellow pencil, the smell of paste.

Oh, I knew it wasn’t perfect all along. Its tears and gravities. Its spaces and caves. As I know it again today

crossing the street your hand in mine heads bowed in a driving rain.

Please by Laura Kasischke

[violettesiren]

The grasses in the field have toppled, and in places it seems that a large, now absent, animal must have passed the night. The hay will right itself if the day

turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully. None of your blustering entrances or exits, doors swinging wildly on their hinges, or your huge unconscious sighs when you read something sad, like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan, where he traveled after Clover died.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain: white irises, red peonies; and the poppies with their black and secret centers lie shattered on the lawn.

Heavy Summer Rain by Jane Kenyon

[violettesiren]

At dusk, the blue line of these hills looks, of course, like waves. So I wave. Hello hills. Being hills, they do not speak back but just draw in more light. Clouds, a small platoon of healing hands, brush the trees. I try to find the exact spot of the stars I liked in last night's sky. Impossible. The leaves sift and muffle, make room for the moon. I try to remember the color of those leaves, how they were. Their shaggy shapes, now draped in dark, cover the round animal back of the hills. I try to remember how it was once ocean floor and will be again, ancestral and related to the sky.

Related To The Sky by Maggie Anderson

[violettesiren]

Why is the sky so tall and over everything?

What you draw as a blue stripe high above a green stripe, white-interrupted, the real sky starts at the tip of each blade of grass and goes up, up, as far as you can see. Our house stops at the roof, at the glitter-black overlap of shingles where the sky presses down, bearing the weight of space, dark and sparkling, on its back. Think of sky not as blue, not as over, but as the invisible surround, a soft suit you wear close to the skin. When you walk, the soles of your feet take turns on the ground, but the rest of you is in the sky, enveloped in sky. As you move through it, you make a tunnel in the precise size and shape of your body.

Sky by Maggie Smith

[violettesiren]

All summer, my dreams have let in rain, finding endless uses for the sound of wet leaves rubbing together. At dawn, I step onto the porch and watch spiders milling about in their webs; sometimes they spin them inside my mailbox, so I reach my hand in and feel, instead of emptiness, their sticky silk, hope, hunger. Hours turn like pages, moving a plot deeper into heat, filled with petals and fleas and, now and then, a praying mantis, which strikes me as a model of dignity, with its big green stillness, like a mind that will not be sent scuttling into the past. Extend the lines of the body, my ballet teacher would say—but that was long ago, and I am trying to stay here among the storms, dust, and hardy plants. Hairy, bee-addled wisteria. Papery discs of lunaria— also called moonwort, silver dollar, honesty.

Self-portrait with Praying Mantis and Endurance by Chloe Honum

[violettesiren]

Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being

postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling

inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled

a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion

after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could

know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.

Summer by Robin Coste Lewis

[violettesiren]

The host's girlfriend is barely seen.

She's busy giving away wild animals to reluctant guests. I agree to take a snake-dog,

maybe an electric eel, but when I feel its sharp teeth in my shoulder,

I start to worry about the future welfare of our fragile cat, the precarious order of our rented home,

and remember I am supposed to be looking for someone…. A half-wolf, half-elephant

cracks through the walls of the peeling wallpapered bedroom

where my former student in a fuschia robe and curlers sits by a lighted make-up mirror.

The shadows off elongated fake eyelashes are as dark as the branches of an evening tree.

The hovering body of a fiery sparrow is almost transparent,

like flute music or an idea.

I turn my back and finally, I spot her my friend, the host.

She's sipping rum punch from a martini glass; her whole body appears to be smiling, glowing,

and I don't know what to think.

I know she doesn't drink, hasn't in decades, and I wonder what's suddenly changed, but then I remember

the cancer won, my friend isn't actually here, there is no party, there was never a house.

Summer by Joanna Fuhrman

[violettesiren]

In the beginning, the unbelievable burgeoning. Did I plant these things in the garden? What in God’s name are they?

In the beginning… Electricity turned to flesh. A billion nerves softened and shocked into blossom, slopped

with a big brush hastily onto the green velvet curtain we called spring. This

is what happens when the living gets easy. Out of the moss, a lot of little fingers clawing themselves up. Ah!

such marriage weather, but in it, too, the delicious mysteries of some other couple’s

precipitous divorce. What

was all that love but a lot of grasshoppers dancing in a crate with some overripe plums? We all

saw it coming.

“Go ahead,” is all my son wants to hear me say. “Feel free to jump on the beds today. Flap

your arms and scream for hours at the top of your lungs.” And my stepdaughter, Hey

how about I take you and all your friends to the mall, and pick you up in seven hours? First

I’d like to give you two hundred dollars.”

And why not? What

a morsel, if you could slip the bones from a hummingbird and dip the whole thing in chocolate sauce. What

was so wrong about the seventies? The Free Love, big shoes, High Times, daisy decals on the shower doors? Now and then, a few sober words about death:

Hey, kids, don’t play with matches.

Then, something changed. The states

make perfect puzzle pieces, like the decades, like the seasons, but in truth

you can find yourself crossing from Indiana to Kentucky without ever knowing you did. The child-

raccoon we fed those bagels to in the backyard yesterday is swarmed with blackflies in the road today. See

how neatly God has trained (with whips and chains) those butterflies to dance from flower to flower. A few delicate shreds of terror trembling in the air.

“I am summer, here

to please you,” the world says to me. I nod pleasantly, but don’t forget the feeling that spread just under my skin

the day a woman I’d always liked stopped me in the stairwell to tell me what she’d always hated about me as if it were advice.

Summer, Here by Laura Kasischke

[violettesiren]

An absolute sound, this soughing above the tops of trees. For the longest while I couldn't look up, so much did I long to see the ocean, rough and whitened,

Such soft ululations, such a drumroll of feathers! Yet it was no other weather than Wind. I looked up; the sky lay blue as always, Biblical and terrifying, just where it was supposed to be.

Mercy by Rita Dove

[violettesiren]

The ash tree drops the few dry leaves it bore in May, stands naked by mid-July. When each day's evil news drains into the next, a monotonous overflow, has a tree's dying lost the right to be mourned? No-life's indivisible. And this tree, rooted beyond my fence, has been, branch and curved twig, in leaf or bare, the net that held the sky in my window. Trunk in deep shade, its lofting crown offers to each long day’s pale glow after the sun is almost down, an answering gold— the last light held and caressed.

Ceremonies by Denise Levertov

[violettesiren]

As I pull the bucket from the crude well, the water changes from dark to a light more silver than the sun. When I pour it over my body that is standing in the dust by the oleander bush, it sparkles easily in the sunlight with an earnestness like the spirit close up. The water magnifies the sun all along the length of it. Love is not less because of the spirit. Delight does not make the heart childish. We thought the blood thinned, our weight lessened, that our substance was reduced by simple happiness. The oleander is thick with leaves and flowers because of spilled water. Let the spirit marry the heart. When I return naked to the stone porch, there is no one to see me glistening. But I look at the almond tree with its husks cracking open int he heat. I look down the whole mountain to the sea. Goats bleating faintly and sometimes bells. I stand there a long time with the sun and the quiet, the earth moving slowly as I dry in the light.

Glistening by Linda Gregg

[violettesiren]

Light layered in light—shelled, shellacked, sari-ed , mandorla-ed in ever lighter light.

Brilliance that blackens, that casts a dust shadow, that opens and shuts like an eye.

Heat that sings, that quiets, that's single and plural, conflagration and candle flame.

Body-spirit-mind edgeless, morphous, no more container than contained.

Red-tongued and panting, draped in the trees, a roar waits in its purr like a mine.

Canticle of Fire by Jennifer Atkinson

[violettesiren]

No talking in the grass, only persistent scars where cheek lay to hear a sound: the distilled conversation

of minute barbed legs, fiddle bow to fiddle. No movement on the pond surface— water slurring its beaded lining, blunted tapestry

of black and blacker, brown and tan. No talking on the part of two dogs engaged in chase and turn, alike under coats

wet dun and spotted damp, the heart's steady hiccough under layers of fascia, muscle, rib. Hands spill the pond water. Nothing can be grasped.

Why inedible hunger? Why insatiable need?

No Talking by Mary Jo Bang

[violettesiren]

Is it the long dry grass that is so erotic, waving about us with hair-fine fronds of straw, with feathery flourishes of seed, inviting us to cling together, fall, roll into it blind and gasping, smothered by stalks and hair, pollen and each other's tongues on our hot faces? Then imagine if the summer rain were to come, heavy drops hissing through the warm air, a sluice on our wet bodies, plastering us with strands of delicious grass; a hum in our ears.

We walk a yard apart, talking of literature and of botany. We have known each other, remotely, for nineteen years.

Prelude by Fleur Adcock

[violettesiren]

–for Terrance Hayes

Once when my coat was too thin, and one torn pocket was all I had left of a great love, I found a blue canto that calmed me. A pine tree was in it, and crows. In my head: one ant after another, carrying its burden. Art sometimes can enter through a sliver. Give it a broken fence, it will trellis over. Once, when no one was near, a split tree calmed me, and a crow’s cry tore the air, and my ear found an oar, and I rowed.

Solace by Kim Addonizio